Keep Out
This is the outer suburbs, the very edge of the city's expanding body - the growth zone. Just a few years ago, this land was raw and unclaimed: flat paddocks, empty soil, bushland stretching into the horizon. The city, driven by the forces of migration and profit seeking, sent in builders, developers, and eager council planners to transform this land into something familiar - housing estates. Spreading like a virus the changes happen rapidly, no time to think, just do it. This series documents the transformation before it becomes ordinary.
People don’t come here just to meet their needs. They come chasing a dream - the dream of ownership. A house, they’re told, brings success, stability, a better life. But dreams aren’t measurable, they don’t guarantee profit. We invest in them anyway. Still, the cracks show: schools are distant, buses scarce, parks empty, crime rising, soil polluted. There are no town squares, no real commons. Neighbor is kept from neighbor.
What remains is a landscape of alienation where private lives are sealed in private lots, stitched together by roads, but not by community. It’s hyper-individualism masked as self-sufficiency.
Housing estates are sold with brand names and glossy identities but in the end, they all look the same. Between the unfinished skeletons of houses and the new asphalt roads, there’s only emptiness. These suburbs are wrapped in fences, uniform endless barricades that seem designed to keep out wildness, irregularity, and anything unplanned. Perhaps to hide that emptiness, they’re dressed in banners: a new oval, a future school, a better life. But what emerges is conflict stillness beside congestion, new streets alongside polluted soil, cul-de-sacs with roads that lead nowhere.
After spending time in the suburbs, I can't help but begin to admire this grandiose display of civilization’s perseverance through copy and repetition. This ability to summon hundreds of identical homes, as it is trying to outlast nature itself. The longer one lingers here, the more seductive their logic becomes. The symmetry becomes attractive, repetitive facades reveal a new kind of beauty even trash tells a story. It’s a language that’s easy to read — primitive in its clarity. Even trash here tells a story.
While traveling through these lands, I found myself slipping into a dreamlike state. Affected by the mind-numbing sameness of the landscape.
The houses began to speak to me, quietly, like poems written on a paper. Each one holding a story, built together with those who live inside.
I wanted to ask them: what kind of future will you bring?